Ripping TV show DVD's

[rmas71]

I recently picked up a older tv series on DVD that I wanna put on my HDD to watch on my network. I used DVDfab and Handbrake, the problems is the 30 mins episodes are about 400meg each. I fooled around with some settings in handbrake but I can't seem to keep the episodes good quality and small size. I see TV eps online for half hour shows that are like 150 meg and excellent quality. How does one achieve this?

[transporterfan]

Why not examine one of the tv shows with MediaInfo, take a half hour tv show you have and try encoding with the results.
No one can say for sure. We have no idea of the resolution, bitrate nor audio or video codecs used.

[rmas71]

I tried that, no luck. Here is a MediaInfo screenshot of my vob source file if that helps. I've been fooling around, but trial and error really sucks when it takes about 30 mins to do 1 episode adjust a setting that do it again lol. Any help would be appreciated.

[poisondeathray]

You would probably have to filter it to get good quality at those low filesizes (handbrake probably isn't enough)

Content complexity matters.

For example if your "older" TV series are noisy, it will consume a lot more bitrate to look a certain level of "quality" than a clean, newer TV series. So you would have to denoise the old series.

Also motion and action require more bitrate. So 30 mins of an action series would require a lot more bitrate than say, a slow moving soap opera. But something like simple cartoons with little detail , are very easy to compress. Maybe 2-5x smaller than live action footage

[rmas71]

I got file size down to 183meg with Handbrake without losing any quality really. I think I'm happy with that.

[transporterfan]

I got file size down to 183meg with Handbrake without losing any quality really. I think I'm happy with that.

That last sentence is the key to everything, video-compression-wise! Lol. 183 meg is good for 30 minutes of video with no significant quality loss.

[hello_hello]

The fact that the video is 4:3 makes it harder to shrink, as for any given width you'll have more picture area than 16:9. If I need to keep the file size down I prefer to reduce the resolution than drop the quality too much, but I've encoded old episodic DVDs where each episode is a bit under 30 minutes and at the same quality setting I've ended up with file sizes ranging from 200GB to 500GB per episode.

[poisondeathray]

The fact that the video is 4:3 makes it harder to shrink, as for any given width you'll have more picture area than 16:9.

You're assuming he's resizing using "square pixels"

AR is irrelevant if you encode with AR flags (--sar x:y)

720x480 is same as 720x480 Makes no difference to difficulty in "shrinking"




The key is whatever quality he's happy with. Some people are more picky than others

[manono]

AR is irrelevant if you encode with AR flags (--sar x:y)

Dollars to donuts says he didn't. In fact, I'd even go so far as to venture he has no idea what AR flags are. Therefore the people in his 720x480 video will appear as slightly fat. But I could be wrong.

[poisondeathray]

I know handbrake uses AR flags. It gets the AR right - BUT it does some weird stuff with resizing and cropping as well . Very non standard ratios and frame sizes. I think you have to force it to encode as original 720x480 if you wanted it that way.

(also VFR stuff, unless you specify otherwise, but that's another story....)

My opinion is any resizing is a deviation from the original, and therefore quality loss. I generally prefer to keep things same as the original.

[hello_hello]

The fact that the video is 4:3 makes it harder to shrink, as for any given width you'll have more picture area than 16:9.

You're assuming he's resizing using "square pixels"

Well...... true.

AR is irrelevant if you encode with AR flags (--sar x:y)

Dollars to donuts says he didn't. In fact, I'd even go so far as to venture he has no idea what AR flags are. Therefore the people in his 720x480 video will appear as slightly fat. But I could be wrong.

I've not used Handbrake in years as we just don't get along, but if you don't use an anamorphic option wouldn't Handbrake resize to square pixels like most other encoder GUIs? It'd be a fairly dumb encoder GUI which doesn't do one or the other by default.